you offer nod redemption to people in prison right now. i want to bring in secretary castro. your response, sir? i agree with senator booker that a lot of what vice president helped author in 94 was a mistake. things. there are a lot of things we can talk about, sentencing reform, investing in public defenders, i m proud that i m the only candidate that has put forward a police reform plan. because we have a police system that is broken, and we need to fix it. whether it s the case of someone like tamir rice or michael brown, or eric garner, where the trump justice department just decided not to pursue charges. we need to ensure we have a national use of force standard and that we end qualified immunity for police officers so we can hold them accountable for using excessive force. i want to bring in i want to bring in governor inslee. your response? i suggest that people come out to the state of washington and see what criminal justice
impeachment. impeachment and trump being above the law, if he s not above the law, he shouldn t be above the law. i think there needs to be more of that because what we know from polling is that the american people are there. they understand. they want to get rid of donald trump. what they want to hear is how do we do it? and so attacking each other or going after each other, going into nuance on policies, is not going to do it. right. and that, again, goes to what is the presentation beyond helping democrats make up their mind, what s the presentation with these highly-watched events, the rest of the country. one more thing before we head off to brian williams, which was there were protesters in the hall. yeah. this is detroit. there were folks raising the issue of police brutality in new york and the famous i can t breathe case with eric garner, something we covered a lot on msnbc. i ve watched it. castro weighing in on that. a very local issue that speaks to something in
officers in deescalation techniques so we have less violence. secretary castro, your response? it s much more that. this was a great example, the other day, the department of justice not going after the officer that the officer used a choke hold that was prohibited by nypd. he did that 11 different times eric garner said he couldn t breathe. he knew what he was doing and yet he has not been brought to justice. that police officer should be off the street. mayor de blasio? mayor de blasio, why is that police officer still on the force, the one who killed eric garner. please respond? i know the garner family, they ve gone through extraordinary pain. they re waiting for justice and they re going to get justice. there s going to be justice. i have confidence in that. in the next 30 days in new york, you know why, because for the
right now we think we re saving money, we end up spending the money in dark ways. we should put money directly into people s hands after prison and before they go into prison. you heard earlier mayor de blasio respond to secretary castro on the question of why the police officer who killed eric garner is still on the nypd. was that response adequate? no. he should be fired. he should be fired now. [ applause ] i sat down with eric garner s mother and i can tell you when you ve lost your son, when he begged for breath, when you know because you have a video, when you know he said i can t breathe so many times over and over again, when you know he used an illegal choke hold, that person should be fired and as if i was the mayor i would fire him. but as president, i would make sure that we had a full investigation, that the report would be made public. if i wasn t satisfied, we have
and in the meantime, what i m working on, and have i been for five years, there will never be another tragedy, there will never be another eric garner because we re changing fundamentally how we police. thank you. but there is one thing i have to say about the justice department. the vice president for two and a half years, mr. vice president, tell us what did you do to try and spur on the justice department to act in the garner case? thank you, mayor de blasio. vice president biden, you can respond to that. we did a lot. number one, we made sure we reduced the federal prison population by 38,000 people, number one. number two, we insisted that we change the roles that police engage in. we provided for body cameras, we made sure there were a lot of things that were changed in the process. 38,000 people in the federal system were released under the system. and so the fact is, that there s a lot we ve done. here s the deal, the fact is that we re talking about things that occurre